209 Nostalgia poems

I can remember when I wanted X more than anything ever—for X fill in from your own childhood [balloon, pencil lead, trading card, shoelaces, a bow or not to have to wear a bow] and now I am moved to action, when I am moved, principally by a memory of what to want. The point is to be, in your own eyes, what you are, or to keep your own tools, so that you can pretend. And so it was no surprise, to me at least, when Cooper, who is two, collapsed in fortissimo fits when he could not have a $20, three-foot-long stuffed frog in the image of Frog from Frog and Toad, since he is Toad. That morning, needing a nap, he had thrown, from the third-story balcony of Miller's Cafe and Bakery, into the whistling rapids and shallows of the Ammonoosuc River, with its arrowheads and caravans of stones, his Red Sox cap. His hair was shining like another planet's second sun, as he explained, looking up, "I threw my hat in the river. I would like my hat back now."

1. In the land of milk and cream delivered early and daily, and always in glass bottles, we care about good grooming and, of course, news of slurs and curs ... Can it really be that home becomes a place to be stranded? “I don’t see a single storm cloud anywhere in the sky, but I can sure smell rain,” out on the edge of Crawfordsville, Indiana, where the answers and questions become identical as evil twins. 2. Basketball ghosts bounce and sweat again in that second-floor gym in the middle of July— that never-to-be-forgotten home of the first-ever Boys State Championship. Rusty jump shots and long-ago corner hooks rim out in a stream of dusted sunlight. “Just to play the game, don’t you know, you know, no matter how much the sacrifice ... ” How searing afternoon’s vagueness now, dreamed in a daylong haze of headache pills downed at the General Lew Wallace Motor Lodge: how the arc of the ball rises to echoes of split-jump cheers in lubricated air, when phantom bodies strive and leap and go prostrate to that squeak of rubber on polished wood— in a game of shirts and skins. 3. You can only wonder how Ezra Pound dissected his time here, among tractors and proctors and temples of antebellum style, as he cooed sweet Greek in the ear of his secular Madonna ... Just now, two pigeons greet first daylight on the Green of Wabash College. Something to be said for being scandalized silly, and in more than one language when life becomes holier than the Crusades. And what’s more—didactic passions eventually drive you insane, thinks young EP, so what? Sew buttons, ha! And make it new always ... and always leave the door cracked open, a light on, and one foot on the floor. 4. “The meatloaf here’s not very good,” warns waitress Lucy, a pretty girl with a tooth missing. Indifferently, day proceeds utterly. Off Country Road X-10, out by Carcus Creek, driving past Minnie Betts’s florist shop and what’s left of the old city jail, you figure each small detail adds glory to any story. “Relax,” says Elton Bidwell, the county’s dead-buzzard collector, “I’ll take care of us all when we com’ on home.” 5. The town goes dark in a killer storm. Collective forgetting and forgiving occurs. But safety comes in many forms. In this vast black you get to thinking about giddy joys and little sorrows, the curse of full employment at minimum wage, and those conspicuous professors— their bowties and braces speaking to the ages and marking moments of learned unworthiness. Maybe, it’s vacuum-packed fear in a stage-managed town. Time to guess what’s behind each tiny crime and local leer, at once rancorous and baffling. Strangers need not apply. A few lights click on at the Shortstop Grille. These cruel weathers turn asphalt slick. The old intramurals begin again. 6. Early Sunday morning and a drunken Elton Bidwell is strung like a scarecrow on his front porch swing, deposited by Grand Wizards from the Odd Fellows Lodge bar late last night—reminder to those devoted folks heading up Church Street with songbooks in hand, that home sure proves just another place to be stranded.

Thirteen years ago,    before bulk barns    and fifth gear diesel tractors,    we rode royal blue tractors with toolboxes big enough    to hold a six pack on ice. In the one hundred fifteen degree    summer heat    with air    so thick with moisture you drink as you breathe. Before the year dusters sprayed malathion over our clustered bodies,    perspiring while we primed bottom lugs, those ground level leaves of tobacco, and it clung to us with black tar so sticky we rolled eight-inch balls off our arms at night    and Cloroxed our clothes for hours and hours. Before we were poisoned    and the hospital thought we had been burned in fires, at least to the third degree, when the raw, oozing hives that covered ninety-eight percent of our bodies from the sprays ordered by the FDA and spread by     landowners, before anyone had seen automated machines that top and prime. While we topped the lavender blooms of many tiny flowers gathered into one,    gorgeous. By grasping hold below the petals with our bare, calloused hands and twisting downward, quick, hard, only one time,    snapped them off. Before edgers and herbicides took what they call weeds, when we walked for days through thirty acres    and chopped them out with hoes. Hoes,    made long before    from wood and steel and sometimes (even longer ago) from wood and deer scapula. Before the bulk primers came and we primed all the leaves by hand, stooped over at the waist for the lower ones    and    through the season gradually    rising higher     until    we stood and worked simultaneously, as married to the fields as we were to each other, carrying up to fifty pounds of fresh leaves under each arm    and    sewing them onto sticks four feet long on a looper under the shade of a tin-roofed barn,    made of shingle, and poking it up through the rafters inside to be caught by a hanger    who poked it up higher in the rafters    to another who held a higher position and    so    they filled the barn. And the leaves hung down like butterfly wings,    though sometimes the color of luna moths,    or Carolina parakeets,    when just an hour ago    they had been laid upon    the old wooden cart trailers pulled behind the orange Allis-Chalmers tractor with huge, round fenders and only a screwdriver and salt in the toolbox, picked by primers    so hot we would race through the rows to reach the twenty-five gallon jugs of water placed throughout the field to encourage    and    in attempt to satisfy our insatiable thirsts from drinking air    which poured through our pores without breaking through to our need    for more water    in the sun. Sun we imagined to disappear yet respected    for growing all things on earth when quenched with rains called forth by our song     and drumming. Leaves, which weeks later,    would be taken down and the strings pulled like string on top of a large dog-food bag and sheeted up into burlap sheets that bundled over a hundred pounds when we smashed down with our feet, but gently smashing, then thrown up high    to a catcher    on a big clapboard trailer pulled behind two-ton trucks and taken to market in Fuquay-Varina and sold to Philip Morris    and Winston-Salem    for around    a buck a pound. Leaves cured to a bright leaf, a golden yellow with the strongest aroma of tobacco barn curing and hand grown quality before the encroachment of big business in the Reagan era and the slow murder of method from a hundred years before. When the loons cried out in laughter by the springs and the bass popped the surface on the pond, early on, next to the fields, before that time when it was unfashionable to transplant each individual baby plant, the infant tobacco we nurtured, to transplant those seedlings to each hill in the field, the space for that particular plant and we watched    as    they would grow. Before all of this new age, new way, I was a sharecropper in Willow Springs, North Carolina, as were you    and we were proud to be Tsa la gi wishing for winter    so we could make camp at Qualla Boundary    and Oconaluftee would be free of tourists and filled with snow and those of us who held out forever and had no CIBs would be home again with our people, while the BIA forgot to watch. When we still remembered before even the Europeans, working now shoulder to shoulder with descendants of their slaves they brought from Africa when they sold our ancestors as slaves in the Middle East, that then the tobacco was sacred to all of us and we prayed whenever we smoked and did not smoke for pleasure    and I    was content and free. Then they came and changed things and you left me for a fancy white girl and I waited on the land until you brought her back in that brand new white Trans Am, purchased from our crop,    you gave her and left her waiting in a motel. The nearest one was forty miles away, but    near enough    for you and    for her    and I knew    though I never spoke a word to you about it,    I knew and I kept it to myself    to this day    and time    and I never let on until I left    on our anniversary. I drove the pick-up down the dirt path    by the empty fields and rented a shack for eighty dollars, the one with cardboard windows and a Gillespie house floor design, with torn and faded floral paper on walls and linoleum so thin over rotted board that the floor gave if you weighed over a hundred pounds.    I did not. And with no running water of any kind,    or bathroom. The one at hilltop,    where I could see out across all the fields and hunt for meat when I wanted and find peace. I heard you remarried and went into automated farming and kept up with America. I watched all of you    from the hill and I waited for the lavender blooms to return    and when it was spring even the blooms    had turned white. I rolled up my bedroll,    remembering before, when the fields were like waves on a green ocean, and turned away,    away from the change and corruption    of big business on small farms of traditional agricultural people,    and sharecroppers. Away,    so that I could always    hold this concise image of before    that    time    and it floods    my memory.

I wish I could find that skinny, long-beaked boy who perched in the branches of the old branch library. He spent the Sabbath flying between the wobbly stacks and the flimsy wooden tables on the second floor, pecking at nuts, nesting in broken spines, scratching notes under his own corner patch of sky. I'd give anything to find that birdy boy again bursting out into the dusky blue afternoon with his satchel of scrawls and scribbles, radiating heat, singing with joy.

If someone tells you that your poem is nostalgic, take it as a compliment. There's no greater praise. In Greek,nostos means "return" and algia"pain." What's a poem without the return of pain?  If they tell you that your poem is melancholic, take that as a compliment, too. In Greek,melan means "black" and khole"bile." What's a poem without the most pernicious disorder of the body and soul?  Pain and illness.  If your poem is nostalgic and melancholic, see a doctor.

That dusty bubble gum, once ubiquitous as starlings, is no more, my love. Whistling dinosaurs now populate only animation studios, the furious actions of angels causing their breasts to flop out in mannerist frescos flake away as sleet holds us in its teeth. And the bus-station's old urinals go under the grindstone and the youthful spelunkers graduate into the wrinkle-causing sun. The sea seemingly a constant to the naked eye is one long goodbye, perpetually the tide recedes, beaches dotted with debris. Unto each is given a finite number of addresses, ditties to dart the heart to its moments of sorrow and swoon. The sword's hilt glints, the daffodils bow down, all is temporary as a perfect haircut, a kitten in the lap, yet sitting here with you, my darling, waiting for a tuna melt and side of slaw seems all eternity I'll ever need and all eternity needs of me.

Before my drift-wood fire I sit, And see, with every waif I burn, Old dreams and fancies coloring it, And folly’s unlaid ghosts return. O ships of mine, whose swift keels cleft The enchanted sea on which they sailed, Are these poor fragments only left Of vain desires and hopes that failed? Did I not watch from them the light Of sunset on my towers in Spain, And see, far off, uploom in sight The Fortunate Isles I might not gain? Did sudden lift of fog reveal Arcadia’s vales of song and spring, And did I pass, with grazing keel, The rocks whereon the sirens sing? Have I not drifted hard upon The unmapped regions lost to man, The cloud-pitched tents of Prester John, The palace domes of Kubla Khan? Did land winds blow from jasmine flowers, Where Youth the ageless Fountain fills? Did Love make sign from rose blown bowers, And gold from Eldorado’s hills? Alas! the gallant ships, that sailed On blind Adventure’s errand sent, Howe’er they laid their courses, failed To reach the haven of Content. And of my ventures, those alone Which Love had freighted, safely sped, Seeking a good beyond my own, By clear-eyed Duty piloted. O mariners, hoping still to meet The luck Arabian voyagers met, And find in Bagdad’s moonlit street, Haroun al Raschid walking yet, Take with you, on your Sea of Dreams, The fair, fond fancies dear to youth. I turn from all that only seems, And seek the sober grounds of truth. What matter that it is not May, That birds have flown, and trees are bare, That darker grows the shortening day, And colder blows the wintry air! The wrecks of passion and desire, The castles I no more rebuild, May fitly feed my drift-wood fire, And warm the hands that age has chilled. Whatever perished with my ships, I only know the best remains; A song of praise is on my lips For losses which are now my gains. Heap high my hearth! No worth is lost; No wisdom with the folly dies. Burn on, poor shreds, your holocaust Shall be my evening sacrifice! Far more than all I dared to dream, Unsought before my door I see; On wings of fire and steeds of steam The world’s great wonders come to me, And holier signs, unmarked before, Of Love to seek and Power to save,— The righting of the wronged and poor, The man evolving from the slave; And life, no longer chance or fate, Safe in the gracious Fatherhood. I fold o’er-wearied hands and wait, In full assurance of the good. And well the waiting time must be, Though brief or long its granted days, If Faith and Hope and Charity Sit by my evening hearth-fire’s blaze. And with them, friends whom Heaven has spared, Whose love my heart has comforted, And, sharing all my joys, has shared My tender memories of the dead,— Dear souls who left us lonely here, Bound on their last, long voyage, to whom We, day by day, are drawing near, Where every bark has sailing room. I know the solemn monotone Of waters calling unto me; I know from whence the airs have blown That whisper of the Eternal Sea. As low my fires of drift-wood burn, I hear that sea’s deep sounds increase, And, fair in sunset light, discern Its mirage-lifted Isles of Peace.

The pathways of my thoughts are cobbled with mesquite blocks and narrow-winding, long and aged like the streets of san fernando de bexar y la villa real de san antonio pensive y callados cada uno con su chiste idiosyncracy crazy turns that are because they are, centuries magic cada uno hecho as í , y with a careful capricho touch, as í . They curl slowly into ripples, earthy and cool like the R í o Medina under the trees silently singing, standing still, and flowing, becoming, became and always as always still fertile, laughing, loving, alivianada R í o Medina under the trees, celebrating life. They end up in the monte, chaparral, llenos de burrs, spurs pero libres Running through the hills freefoot con aire azul blue breaths peacefully taken between each lope remembering venado remembering conejos remembering where we came from

In tattered old slippers that toast at the bars, And a ragged old jacket perfumed with cigars, Away from the world and its toils and its cares, I’ve a snug little kingdom up four pair of stairs. To mount to this realm is a toil, to be sure, But the fire there is bright and the air rather pure; And the view I behold on a sunshiny day Is grand through the chimney-pots over the way. This snug little chamber is cramm’d in all nooks With worthless old nicknacks and silly old books, And foolish old odds and foolish old ends, Crack’d bargains from brokers, cheap keepsakes from friends. Old armour, prints, pictures, pipes, china (all crack’d), Old rickety tables, and chairs broken-backed; A twopenny treasury, wondrous to see; What matter? ’tis pleasant to you, friend, and me. No better divan need the Sultan require, Than the creaking old sofa that basks by the fire; And ’tis wonderful, surely, what music you get From the rickety, ramshackle, wheezy spinet. That praying-rug came from a Turcoman’s camp; By Tiber once twinkled that brazen old lamp; A Mameluke fierce yonder dagger has drawn: ’Tis a murderous knife to toast muffins upon. Long, long through the hours, and the night, and the chimes, Here we talk of old books, and old friends, and old times; As we sit in a fog made of rich Latakie This chamber is pleasant to you, friend, and me. But of all the cheap treasures that garnish my nest, There’s one that I love and I cherish the best: For the finest of couches that’s padded with hair I never would change thee, my cane-bottom’d chair. 'Tis a bandy-legg'd, high-shoulder'd, worm-eaten seat, With a creaking old back, and twisted old feet; But since the fair morning when Fanny sat there, I bless thee and love thee, old cane-bottom'd chair. If chairs have but feeling, in holding such charms, A thrill must have pass'd through your wither'd old arms! I look'd, and I long'd, and I wish'd in despair; I wish'd myself turn'd to a cane-bottom'd chair. It was but a moment she sate in this place, She'd a scarf on her neck, and a smile on her face! A smile on her face, and a rose in her hair, And she sate there, and bloom'd in my cane-bottom'd chair. And so I have valued my chair ever since, Like the shrine of a saint, or the throne of a prince; Saint Fanny, my patroness sweet I declare, The queen of my heart and my cane-bottom'd chair. When the candles burn low, and the company's gone, In the silence of night as I sit here alone— I sit here alone, but we yet are a pair— My Fanny I see in my cane-bottom'd chair. She comes from the past and revists my room; She looks as she then did, all beauty and bloom; So smiling and tender, so fresh and so fair, And yonder she sits in my cane-bottom'd chair.

Where is your father whose eye you were the apple of? Where are your mother’s parlor portieres, her slip-covered days, her petticoats? In the orchard at the other end of  time, you were just a child in ballet slippers, Your first poodle skirt, your tortoiseshell barrettes. As the peach tree grew more Scarce each day, you kept running out to try to tape the leaves back on their boughs. Once, I caught you catch a pond of sunlight in your lap and when you stood, The sunlight spilt; it could never follow you. Once, above the river, You told me you were born to be a turtle, swimming down. Under the bridge Now you take your meals where the thinnest creatures live at the end Of the world.Carpe Demon, you told me just before you put down the phone And drank the antifreeze. This year, the winter sky in Missouri is a kind of cold The color of a turtle’s hood, a soup of dandelion, burdock root, and clay.